David Farnor | On 12, Jan 2016

Good Girls Revolt has officially been cancelled and will not air on another network.

The show, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video last year, was inspired by the landmark sexual discrimination cases covered in Lynn Povich’s book of the same time. Set in the 1960s, it followed a group of female researches at News of the Week, who stood up to their bosses. The cast included Genevieve Angelson, Anna Camp, and Grace Gummer.

“A period drama that still feels current, [it’s] a fearless look at timeless issues,” we wrote in our review.

Now, though, that discussion of an important topic will not continue – at least, not as far as Amazon’s series is concerned. Amazon announced its plans to stop the show in December 2015, a surprise call that was made within weeks of the programme premiering. It follows the decision not to renew Hand of God either.

Creator Dana Calvo attempted to find another home for the series, with Sony’s TriStar TV arm shopping it around to other buyers, but no network picked it up. With extended cast options expiring at the end of December, and briefly extended as Sony tried to find a new home for the show, Calvo took to Instagram to confirm the news.

“Good Girls Revolt won’t be airing on another network,” she wrote. “We made what felt like a 10-hour play, and I will miss the world and the characters that our cast brought to life. Mostly, I will miss hearing from all of you who said it had an impact. Sending love and thanks today for the privilege of being able to tell stories that bring us closer and make us stronger.”

The good news is that you can still see the whole of Season 1 on Amazon Prime Video.

 

Amazon axes Good Girls Revolt, but will Season 2 appear elsewhere?

3rd December 2016

Amazon has made the surprise decision not to renew Good Girls Revolt for a second season.

The show, inspired by the landmark sexual discrimination cases covered in Lynn Povich’s book of the same time, is set in the 1960s and follows a group of female researches at News of the Week, who stand up to their bosses. The cast includes Genevieve Angelson, Anna Camp, and Grace Gummer. “A period drama that still feels current, [it’s] a fearless look at timeless issues,” we wrote in our review. Now, though, that discussion of an important topic may not continue.

The move bucks the trend for the streaming service, which has been stepping up its renewals in recent years, as Amazon looks to build its library of original series. Apart from Hand of God, which will not be renewed after its upcoming second run, most of Amazon’s pilots and shows have enjoyed rapid commissions, as it places a growing emphasis on its current wave of prestigious, acclaimed titles, quietly replacing its very first forays into original telly, such as Alpha House.

Indeed, Amazon is now a Golden Globe winner several times over, thanks to Mozart in the Jungle and Transparent.
Good Girls Revolt, widely compared to Mad Men, looked like it could fall in the awards-friendly bracket too. It was certainly broadly well-received by critics. Audiences, too, appear to get on board, according to unofficial figures from Symphony Advanced Media. The tech company, which measures audience size on VOD platforms through audio recognition, estimates that Good Girls Revolt had double the audience of Transparent, which works out at around 3 million viewers within 35 days of its premiere, compared to Transparent Season 2’s 1.5 million within the same window.

The decision is even more unexpected, given that the 35-day window has barely passed; the show premiered only a matter of weeks ago, with the US election largely dominating the media and conversation topics in the past month, which means any buzz surrounding the series may only become apparent in the coming weeks.

“Based on data provided to us from Sony, Symphony Advanced Media reported our show was a hit, and we have loyal viewers,” creator Dana Calvo told Kate Arthur of Buzzfeed. “80 per cent of people who watched the first few minutes of the pilot stayed until the last minutes of the finale. We had twice Transparent’s audience. We were stunned by Amazon’s decision, but heartened and encouraged by Sony’s devotion to the project.”

With such a reportedly strong completion rate and loyal audience, the kind of thing that streaming services prize, could it be a simple case of budgeting? The decision not to renew Good Girls Revolt arrives in the wake of the debut of The Grand Tour, Amazon’s new motoring series, which is thought to cost around $70 million, while it has also splashed even more cash on, ironically, the new show from Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner.

As Calvo says, Sony is certainly not disheartened: the studio is shopping the series to other outlets in the hope of a pick-up for a second season.

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